Due to the recent demise of British magazines such as Maxim and Arena, I decided to do some vox pops to see which magazines people would hate to see fold and which ones they wouldn’t mind seeing the back of. Click on the link below to hear the podcast.

The future of glossy, monthly magazines is looking increasingly shaky as news of the demise of men’s magazine Maxim is revealed this week. The magazine can no longer sustain its print version so is now confined solely to the web. This, of course, throws up all kinds of worrying questions about the future of print magazines in general, especially after the recent death of Arena and Eve. Perhaps the future of magazines is inevitably going to be online, a terrifying thought for any aspiring magazine journalist.

The launch of a different kind of men’s mag this week, Wired, does something to dispel this view however. Primarily a technology and lifestyle magazine with the tagline: ‘The future as it happens,’ Wired has jumped into the market at exactly the right time.

So, perhaps it’s not the demise of print journalism that we should be worried about, rather a shift in mood that the likes of Arena and Maxim have not been able to catch up with.

James Brown, former Loaded editor wrote in today’s Observer: “There are many reasons why the monthly men’s magazines sector is collapsing. They became to narrow in focus, driven mainly by covers selling sex, and they were rendered less relevant by the arrival of weeklies (Nuts and Zoo), frees (Shortlist and Sport) and specialist male newspaper supplements (The Mail on Sunday’s Live and Observer Sport Monthly).”

A few weeks ago I blogged about my lack of understanding of the concept of Twitter. Since then I have become a fully fledged member of the tweeting revolution and am embarrassed to say that I now check Twitter with the same avidity in which I used to check Facebook. However, the thing is, I do feel like I’m taking a whole lot more from it than I’m actually giving.

I’m ashamed to say that my use of Twitter is purely for selfish, journalistic reasons and that I get so much more from those I am following than any of my followers are getting from me. I have, in all honesty, only contributed four tweets to the global Twitter explosion, all of which have been either totally inconsequential or shamelessly self-promoting.

On the plus side, I’m definitely starting to see the benefits of Twitter from a journalistic point of view. Twitter now makes it much easier to stay in the media loop, instead of having to trawl through various websites to get news, you just have to use one. So basically, it’s the antidote to being a lazy journalist- it does all the work for you. I follow Media Guardian, Press Gazette, journalism.co.uk, and various other fountains of insider knowledge.

Twitter icon for Fluid

The thing about Twitter is that it is so simple. A couple of weeks ago at City university we had a roundtable discussion in practices in online journalism. This featured heavyweight online aficionados such as Pete Clifton, head of editorial development for BBC multimedia and Jemima Kiss, Guardian reporter and blogger extraordinaire.

They all saw Twitter as a potentially excellent journalistic tool. Jemima, who is an avid tweeter herself, made the point that it is the way that people use Twitter that makes it great, not the actual site:

“We shouldn’t obsess about Twitter as a stand alone concept- it is the power behind how it is being used. The skill with twitter is learning how to use it and how to filter it. It is a tool of communication.”

Workshops are now actually being established to help journalists get the best out of Twitter. Matthew Ingram, communities editor at the Toronto-based globe and Mail newspaper recently ran a workshop for his colleagues and blogged about his efforts:

Of course, there are dangers with Twitter, as you would expect with anything that is seemingly so easy to use. You need to know how to determine what is rubbish and what is actually worth something. Learning how to filter the information is surely the key to using Twitter successfully.

So, in my panic about the lack of jobs in the media I decided to find out what my fellow City students had lined up for after they graduate and what one of our tutors did when he graduated during the last recession…

As the end of my journalism course becomes slightly more visible, panic is definitely starting to grow. Whispers of “job” and “internship” can be heard floating around the department and that niggling little worry that there are actually no jobs to be had in the media is beginning to surface.

Anxious questioning of fellow students reveals that, in fact, we are all in the same crammed and nervy boat. Hardly anyone has anything lined up for when they finish and everyone is still pretty clueless about how to go about finding anything. Far from reassuring me that I am not alone, I am acutely aware that there will be 46 of us released into the job arena at the same time, vying for minimum wage internships and editorial assistant jobs at Total Karp. And that’s just on the City magazine course.

While we are reassured by tutors that jobs will indeed materialise, I am becoming more unnerved by the day. An event held by Women in Journalism last week in Islington made it clear that coming straight out of a postgraduate course and into a job is becoming more unlikely. Maureen Rice, editor of Psychologies magazine commented on how internships are fast becoming the only way to get into a paid job on a magazine.

This may be the case for many magazines but I wonder how much of a waste of time it is to do an internship that doesn’t lead straight into a job. I did some work experience at Easy Living magazine over Christmas and was working along side a six-month-er who was coming towards the end of her minimum-wage internship. She told me how she was struggling to live in London on minimum wage and was hoping that this internship would leave to a permanent position at the magazine and a pay increase.

While I was there she was called into a meeting and told that they would not be taking her on after her six months were up as the magazine had no positions available. She was suddenly completely jobless and I don’t think my interjections of, “at least it will look good on your C.V” did much to console her.

So, even if you manage to get into an internship, there is no guarantee that this will lead into a job. A friend of mine from my course has decided to turn this job-drought into an opportunity to go abroad for a few months and take some journalistic work in Shanghai. This is starting to sound enviable. Ruth Gledhill told us that if we ever wanted to go travelling for a year, this is certainly the year to do it. Either that or, as Maureen Rice said that many young journalists are doing, turn from journalism to PR. God, I think I know which one I’d prefer.

As part of my journalism course, I specialise in world faiths. At the beginning of the course I quickly began to realise that I knew nothing about religion and started to question my place on the specialism. I was studying to be a reporter of world faiths, training to convey important religious issues to those who knew far more about it than I did. I failed to see to how my coverage of or opinion on religion was worth anything. I mean, I have never been religious and grew up in a secular household.

Once into the course I began to realise that I was wrong and that you don’t actually have to be religious to be a religious reporter. World Faiths has turned out to be one of the highlights of my course. Religious site visits and interviews have actually taught me a lot about different religions and through these I have begun to develop my own opinions of them.

Last Friday, one of our tutors Ruth Gledhill, faith correspondent for The Times, gave us a crash course in becoming a religious reporter. She explained that objectivity is key when reporting on religion so not belonging to one doesn’t make you any less likely to report accurately. Ruth told us that being a good religious reporter is not about being religious; it’s about following certain rules like in any other area of journalism. It’s about doing the right research, not using a story to teach or preach and letting people label themselves.

Religion, in our community,is much more than believing, or not believing in something. People are all motivated by faith, in one way or another in their lives. The point is, religion provokes opinion and activity and activity provokes news.